Independent People (53 page)

One would have thought that a young girl on a lonely croft would have been stirred most at hearing a poem that tells of virtue, or at least of sacrifice—of great souls who lived in self-denial or undertook some incredibly heroic task for the sake of some worthy object, the fatherland for instance, such as she herself had felt capable of that night on the paving last spring. But such was not the case, not altogether. The poems that touched her heart most, suffusing her with exalted emotion, so that she felt she could gather everything to her, were those which tell of the sorrow that wakes in the heart whose dreams have not been fulfilled, and of the beauty of that sorrow. The ship that in autumn lies deserted on the shore, rudderless, mastless, used no more; the bird that cowers low in shelter, likewise in the autumn, featherless and forlorn, driven before the storm; the harp that hangs trembling on the wall, silently mourning its owner’s fall—all this was her poetry, all this she understood. And despite the fact that Colma’s song on the heath was nowhere rhymed, she had it by heart before she knew. Whereas one might have imagined that her favourite poetry would have dealt with love meeting love on the heath, she was no sooner in bed in the evenings than there sang in her heart lines telling of when the heath and love meet in the night, love and the heath, and the tears would soon be trickling down her cheeks, and she would feel that she was weeping not for Colma alone, and not for herself alone, but weeping with all the world in an ecstasy of love:

And she would bury her face in the pillow to stifle the sound of her sobbing, for no one might discover that she was weeping because of Ossian, no one would ever think of blubbering as much as our Asta Sollilja. But why was she weeping over this poem? It was because she understood both love and the heath, like Ossian, for he who understands the heath understands love, and he who understands love understands the heath.

And the hunter by the Mississippi. There was once a man. He was a hunter and must surely have travelled over all the world. It says in the poem that he was born in the lovely field of France—“There lived my noble parents.” Everything that is good and everything that is delightful vied in their effort to please him. In childhood he read flowers in the meadows by the Seine. Paris with its fascinating hubbub—there stood his cradle. He lived among loving brothers, and he had playmates, and the girls among them were so pretty, a thousand times prettier than Asta Sollilja:

And yet he did not find the happiness he had dreamed of, nor the peace he had so much desired, and she understood him, and loved him for that very reason, that he had found neither happiness nor peace; deep, deep inside her she loved him because he had fled. And now he sat on the wooded shores where the Mississippi rushed along:

She had always understood both poetry and other things in a way of her own. For example, she had gone to bed one night. And she was pretending to be asleep, as she always did as soon as she was in bed, but she was not asleep. She was waiting for the old grandmother to put out her candle. The moments passed. And then out of the corner of her eye she saw a man sitting up in bed, resting his chin on his hand. She surveyed the sharply hewn cheekbone, the shaggy brow above the dark, searching gaze which held at other moments the whole of poetry’s bewitching play of light and colour, and she saw also his throat bare down to the open neckband of his shirt; and he went on staring and he went on thinking, as in the poem:

—for over his head the rotten boards of the clincher roof had become a rustling forest where deer and panthers roamed, and the Goa storm that was sweeping the snow into deeper and deeper drifts was the roar of the Mississippi in flood, and he who had fled from the lovely cities of the world was sitting here, running his eyes over his former life.

No. It was neither heroes nor sacrifice nor yet virtues that she loved most; rather the poetry which spoke to her of dreams that were either fulfilled to no purpose or never fulfilled at all; of happiness that came as a visitor or did not come, of how it came and went, or of how it never came. She saw and understood this man, not in an objective way, but in her own way: in the lambent
colours of poetry, with woods in the background, and penetrating everything, the roar of the world’s deepest and mightiest river.

A
ND
now to tell of God.

For two years or more she and the others had longed to make the acquaintance of God, to know where He was and what He was thinking and whether He ruled the world in actual fact.

And now there were available on the croft two books, the Bible stories and the Catechism, which dealt exclusively with God, and there was likewise a teacher whom one would have expected to know all the principal features at least of this peculiar being who lives in exaltation far above all other beings. The story of how He created the world aroused their interest immediately, even though they received no answer to the question of why He had had to do it; but they found it difficult to understand sin, or the manner of its entry into the world, for it was a complete mystery to them why the woman should have had such a passionate desire for an apple when they had no idea of the seductive properties of apples and thought they were some sort of potatoes. But less intelligible still was the flood that was caused by forty days’ rain, and forty nights’. For here on the moors there were some years when it rained for two hundred days and two hundred nights, almost without fairing; but there was never any Flood. When they began to question their teacher more closely about this riddle, he replied, perhaps not without a trace of irritation: “Well, I don’t vouch for it in any case.” It said in the Bible that God once came, attended by two angels, to visit a famous man abroad, but the narrative was in other respects extremely vague; what did God look like? “Oh, I expect He would have a beard,” replied the teacher without much conviction; he had been lying motionless on the bed for some time now, with his head pillowed in his hands, staring up at the roof in obvious preoccupation. Then it occurred to little Nonni to ask whether God had had any clothes on—or was He naked? “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” cried Asta Sollilja. Later He sent us His only begotten Son, that good man who told stories and performed miracles, but somehow or other the children associated it all with Olafur of Yztadale, whose interest in the incomprehensible had never earned him much respect, and both parables and
miracles alike left the children as utterly unmoved as if they had been news from a country so remote that one had never even heard of it. Even little Nonni, whose love for countries was undeniable, did not wish to go there. And since, whenever they began to discuss this matter, the teacher always tried to change the subject, the children conceived involuntarily the idea that it was something rather improper. The crucifixion acted upon them as something unnaturally horrible, even though they had no idea of a cross; they associated it involuntarily with what had happened last Christmas, something that might not be mentioned, something that belongs only to the most frightful of dreams, something that makes one wake in a sweat at night, when one lies in an awkward position, or with a lump beneath one; and one looks at the window and hopes that some light will soon be showing there. Asta Sollilja closed the book with a shudder; she felt that it was all so horrible, and she hoped that her brother Nonni would not read about it until he was older, he was so sensitive. She laid the book on the shelf. They did not learn about the Resurrection or the Ascension of Jesus. God was never farther away from them than when they had read this book. Asta Sollilja had been greatly disappointed in God. Yet He did not entirely vanish from her sight until she began to read the Catechism. She was very sad and very pensive about the whole affair. Again and again she sought to wake Him up from death and to stammer forth some clumsy question addressed to her teacher. But it ended always in one more defeat for God.

“Have you ever tried to pray to God?” she asked one day.

For a good while he was reluctant to answer, but at long length it emerged that he had prayed to God. What for? Without looking up, and obviously much against his will, he told her in confidence that he had prayed to God that he might be allowed to keep his foot; he had lain in an infirmary. And then the foot was taken off.

Asta Sollilja: “I think a man looks very nice with a foot like yours.”

And God was finished for that day.

The second time:

“It says that God is infinitely good. Is He infinitely good too when someone is in trouble?”

The teacher: “Surely.”

Asta Sollilja: Then He can’t very well be infinitely happy.”

He: I know that, my dear”—and suddenly losing his patience:
‘There’s not a word of
it
true. It’s utter rubbish. It’s meant for soft, neurotic people.”

Asta Sollilja: “My father is hard.”

“Yes,” said the teacher. “He’s a tough proposition.”

And once more God had evaporated from the conversation.

Third day: “I woke up early this morning, and as I opened my eyes I began to think about God, and I realized suddenly that He must exist. For how could anything exist if God didn’t exist?”

After lengthy deliberation the teacher whispered: “Yes, it’s probable that something may exist. But we don’t know what it is.”

Full stop.

Fourth day: “Then why did God allow sin to enter the world?”

At first the teacher seemed not to have heard this question; he lay for a good while staring blindly in front of him, as if in a trance, a thing that occurred more and more frequently every day now; then suddenly he sprang up with a startling abruptness, gazed intently at the girl with huge eyes, and repeated questioningly: “Sin?” Then he burst into a long fit of coughing, a deep, toneless, rattling cough; his face grew red and finally almost blue, the veins swelled in his neck, his eyes filled with tears. And when at last the fit was over, he dried his eyes and whispered breathlessly, “Sin—sin is God’s most precious gift.”

Asta Sollilja went on gazing at her teacher, both with the straight eye and with the squint eye, but she did not dare ask any further question, because she was afraid of the unpredictable conclusions arrived at in theology, and besides, the teacher was quite exceptionally breathless today. She stood up and, as unobtrusively as possible, laid the Catechism on the shelf beside the Bible stories.

“Yes,” whispered the teacher, “it’s quite inevitable;” but she did not even dare ask him what was inevitable, for it is better, she thought, not to know the inevitable before it happens, and possibly one thing is more inevitable than anything else: the two standpoints that struggle for superiority over the soul of man till one or the other is vanquished, like the hart and the panther which lurk in the forest around the hunter. Early in the evening he wrote a letter in an elegant hand, almost a masterpiece of ornate calligraphy, put it in an enevelope, addressed it to Dr. Finsen, sealed it.

“Gvendur my boy,” he said when the brothers had come in,
“if you should see anyone making for Fjord tomorrow, just ask them if they’ll take this letter for me. It’s to old Finsen about my cough.”

That evening she heard him sighing heavily, yawning, and muttering occasionally a long-drawn “yes” or “oh dear me,” or “oh;” or simply “a.” Sometimes in the middle of it all he whispered despairingly to himself:

“It’s no good at all.” Or: “What difference does it make anyway?”

And when she heard this she was gripped by the fear that he was tired of this little low-roofed croft and had discovered that this was not the kingdom of happiness, perhaps not even the kingdom of innocence, which he had first imagined. She was more afraid of his soliloquy than of his cough, for she had been reared on coughing, her foster-mother had coughed, her grandmother coughed night and morning. What really cut her to the heart was that he should be no longer happy with them, that possibly he wanted to leave them and to go out into the world.

And she asked him, as she had often asked her foster-mother: “Wouldn’t you like a drink of water?” She had grown used to offering people a drink of water if they were not feeling very well, cold water always helps a little.

But he replied with a long-drawn no. She kept on gazing at him on the sly, so distressed at the thought of not being able to do something for him that she could not turn her hand to anything, oh dear, if he should go away and leave them. She had tried to do all that she could for him, always served him with the best piece of meat at dinner-time, given him coffee six and as many as eight times a day, with the result that she would soon have no coffee left, and nothing seemed to have been of any use, what was she to do? Every new day saw a further increase in his despondency; he recited fewer and fewer poems, grew less and less inclined to enlarge upon the world’s civilization, found it more and more difficult to rid himself of his melancholy thoughts. She longed so much to say something comforting, for though young, she knew from personal experience what the soul may sometimes have to contend with in private, and how one kindly word can disperse the clouds that gather there; but she had not the courage to say anything, rather turned her head aside as her eyes filled with tears.